Who Does Obama's New CIO Love Most: Google, Microsoft, or Apple?

Ever since Vivek Kundra was appointed by Obama last week as the US's first Chief Information Officer, the blogosphere has been abuzz about what it will mean for tech juggernauts like Google, Microsoft, and Apple. The 34-year-old former CTO of Washington, D.C. will be the grand decider of the county's $71 billion IT budget, and you can bet Eric Schmidt, Steve Ballmer and Steve Jobs' placeholder are angling this very minute for their piece of the billion dollar pie.

The rumors swirling around are that the India-born Kundra is a Blackberry-addicted, Google-apps-maps-obsessed, cloud-computing, open source feinding, crowd sourcing, Apple zealot. (And this is the US government we're talking about?!). Last year Kundra reportedly had 38,000 D.C. staffers ditch Microsoft Office in favor of Google Apps and this video of Kundra ogling over Google has been making the rounds. It seems like Microsoft is once again culturally the odd man out.

Meanwhile, the elephant in the room is that Obama still hasn't managed to fill the Chief Technology Officer post. Google's Schmidt reportedly turned down the job. Who do you think should be Obama's tech czar and why do you think he's having such a tough time filling it?

Its good to see governments starting to use off the self technology products instead of exotic and expensive custom solutions.

Though I dont understand why there is such a backlash against MS products. Technically you can do the same thing (and more) using MS SharePoint (and even IBM Lotus Notes?). We are using MS Sharepoint at work and I find it a bit more mature as a product than Google Apps.